5. Rapid-Fire First Reaction To Latest College Football Playoff Rankings

As always, it’s all about the finish, not the start. Did you win your Power Five conference championship, and did you go unbeaten or finish with one loss. That gets you by the bouncer, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get into the club. But …

If you like LSU enough to put it was 3, you sort of need to give Florida more love than 11, and you sort of need to give Kentucky more love than 9. More on that in a moment.

The committee has to do a better job of taking into account the schedules and not just look at the record. Again, there’s no real excuse for Florida to be at 11 – with losses to No. 6 Georgia and No. 9 Kentucky – behind an Ohio State team that got annihilated by Purdue other than that one team is 6-2 and the other is 7-1. The Gators have the best win by anyone so far this year with the victory over No. 3 LSU. Ohio State’s only decent win is over No. 14 Penn State.

What’s Oklahoma’s good win? The Sooners beat No. 24 Iowa State on the road, but is that enough to be at No. 7 over the resume that No. 9 Kentucky brings?

Penn State has done … what? There aren’t any wins over ranked teams and there’s nothing on the resume to be at 14 over Texas at 17.

Related

Again, the committee has to do a much better job of rewarding big wins. Texas losing to Maryland in the opener shouldn’t have been punished as much as it was.

It seems like the committee put West Virginia at 13 only because it kept boosting up the one-loss part of the puzzle. It’s the lowest-ranked one-loss Power Five team.

In general, the big issue is how the committee put together a mish-mosh of the rankings. There needs to be a hard set of criteria to go on, because they went a wee bit on the eye test, a wee bit on resume, a wee bit on feel, a wee bit on big wins, a wee bit on close losses, and there no rhyme or reason to it all. They took all of the pieces and put together a puzzle that looks like a Jackson Pollock.